While he backed the six-week ban in his home state, he’s so far avoided getting behind calls for the kind of federal ban that has been championed by anti-abortion rights groups. It’s not as if abortion restrictions are the central theme of DeSantis’s presidential campaign. “Now, there is clearly a pro-life segment of the Republican vote, but that’s offset by the impact of independents.” “This is a pro-choice state and that goes right down through both parties,” said Tom Rath, a longtime GOP consultant and former New Hampshire attorney general. In the last three Republican nominating contests in which an incumbent president wasn’t on the ballot, the winner of the New Hampshire primary ultimately emerged as the eventual nominee. The state also has a better recent track record of determining the GOP’s White House nod than Iowa. Republicans tend to home in on fiscal issues, and independent voters are seen as a critical bloc in the primaries. Unlike Iowa or South Carolina, religious conservatives tend to hold less sway. New Hampshire holds a unique role in the early presidential primary calendar. “He’s talking about doing things in Washington that folks haven’t gotten done, and whether that’s Ron or all the candidates, that’s what we have to be talking about.”
“He talked about fiscal discipline,” Sununu said. In an appearance on Fox News, Sununu said that DeSantis had demonstrated that he’s about more than “the woke stuff.” James Spillane announced that he would be flipping his endorsement from Trump to DeSantis, arguing that the former president’s recent attack on his former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany had shown that Trump had not learned any “measure of control” since leaving the White House.ĭeSantis’s swing through New Hampshire also earned some praise from the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, who is weighing a 2024 bid of his own. While polls show him running well behind Trump in the state, he’s already amassed the support of dozens of New Hampshire legislators, including a few who previously backed Trump for the 2024 nomination. Multiple Republicans said DeSantis is starting his campaign in New Hampshire in a strong position. “I heard DeSantis speak for about an hour, and he didn’t mention abortion once.” “This tends to be a state where issues like abortion energize Democrats and divide Republicans,” said Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. Yet not once did he mention the six-week abortion ban that he signed into law in April, avoiding an issue that he highlighted repeatedly while he toured culturally conservative Iowa earlier in the week. And he praised New Hampshire for “holding the line” in deep-blue New England, noting that, like Florida, the Granite State doesn’t collect a personal income tax. He still discussed fixtures of his typical stump speech, railing against “woke indoctrination” and touting his feud with Disney and his work on universal school choice. “Not only appealing to base Republican activists, but also that undeclared vote and what may draw them in.”Īs he swung through the state Thursday in his first tour as a presidential candidate, there were signs that DeSantis was aware of his audience. “Candidates here really need to think through their strategy,” he added. The pro-life community here isn’t as big as it is in Iowa.” “We have more of a fiscally conservative, more socially moderate general electorate. “Culturally, we’re less conservative, so there’s definitely a difference there,” said Jim Merrill, a veteran Republican consultant in New Hampshire. Since launching his presidential bid last week, DeSantis has leaned into his credentials as a conservative culture warrior, hoping to outflank his chief rival, former President Donald Trump, from the right.īut that strategy carries significant risks in New Hampshire, where libertarian-leaning Republicans and a sizable cohort of independent voters play an outsized role in determining the winner of the critical first-in-the-nation GOP primary. Ron DeSantis is facing a test of his hard-right political brand in New Hampshire, one that requires him to strike a more moderate tone on some of the cultural issues that have come to define his rise to prominence.
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